Observer lets its guard down

The Independent walked away with the coveted Newspaper of the Year title at this week’s annual British Press Awards and deservedly so. Not just because a 13 per cent year-on-year increase in circulation at a time when sales of other qualities are falling has vindicated the considerable risk editor Simon Kelner and publisher Ivan Fallon took in going tabloid, though that would be reason enough.

The tabloid strategy has also reinvigorated the Indy’s journalism; the paper has a spring in its step once more after years in the doldrums. The excitement and attention that going tabloid has generated, after a period in which the paper was largely ignored, has rubbed off to the benefit of the paper.

It’s been an expensive revival, of course, and it has not yet transformed the Independent’s position in the marketplace: it still remains in last place in the quality market, more than 100,000 behind the Guardian, even though that paper has lost 10 per cent of its sale year-on-year.

But the Indy is going in the right direction, there is still momentum in its sales, the gap with the Guardian is narrowing and is anyway somewhat exaggerated by the Guardian’s substantial Saturday sale. Meanwhile, the rest of the competition is going in the wrong direction or going nowhere at all.

The Times has so far enjoyed nothing like the Indy’s success with its tabloid strategy: the most that can be said is that the Times has halted (or at least slowed) what looked like a relentless slide to 600,000. But sales last month, at 656,000, were still two per cent below a year ago and there is clearly some resistance among a section of Times readers to its tabloid size.

The paper has been carrying a full-page letter from editor Robert Thomson telling readers to call a special number if they are having trouble getting the size of Times they want. The number has been inundated by angry readers demanding better broadsheet availability. There have also been a host of complaints from broadsheet-inclined readers whose home delivery service has sent the tabloid.

The prospect now facing the Times is that it will be lumbered producing both a broadsheet and compact edition for the foreseeable future, which is expensive in terms of money and manpower. Proprietor Rupert Murdoch, who has struggled so long and hard to make the Times profitable, will not be happy about that.

By contrast, it is only a matter of weeks before the Indy goes entirely tabloid. The broadsheet edition now accounts for only 30 per cent of sales and distribution is now largely limited to the Greater London area. I expect the broadsheet edition to be dumped before the end of May.

But not on a Sunday. Publisher Fallon has shelved plans for now to go tabloid on the seventh day. He wants to concentrate his firepower on the continued resurgence of the daily. But the Independent on Sunday does need attention: sales are struggling to stay over 200,000 and are 6 per cent down year-on-year.

The problems of the Sindy are as nothing, however, to the troubles of the Telegraph and the Guardian. The Telegraph has resorted to artificial devices - extra bulk and foreign sales - to keep its headline figure above 900,000 while editors are frustratingly caught in a no-man’s land of indecision while its future ownership remains unresolved.

But the Guardian has no such excuse for its indecision. A few months ago I would have laughed at the idea of the Indy even coming within hailing distance of Britain’s premier left-wing broadsheet. Now, after reading Alan Rusbridger’s interview in yesterday’s Financial Times, I am not so sure.

The Guardian editor is all over the place. Having clearly ruled out going tabloid only a few weeks ago and doing so with great fanfare, he is now maintaining that he hasn’t actually said the Guardian will stay broadsheet, while trailing the possibility of adopting the European tabloid size, for which no printing capacity exists in Britain.

The Indy has a steep hill to climb to overtake the Guardian but I wouldn’t completely rule it out. One thing’s for sure: if the Guardian was owned by a quoted company rather than a trust and you had shares in the paper after Rusbridger’s FT interview ... you’d sell ’em!

REGULAR readers of this column will know that I regard the Observer as the most serious and authoritative of British Sunday papers. So I was depressed by the star treatment and free ride it gave the returning British inmates from the US prison camp at Guantánamo.

For a start, it should never have splashed with their story on the day when the real and developing story was the growing evidence that it was Islamic rather than Basque extremists who had been responsible for the massacre in Madrid. It wasn’t even as if the interviews were entirely exclusive: some of the returnees had already spoken to the Mirror.

More important, the Observer accepted everything they had to say about their treatment in Guantánamo - plus their distinctly dodgy reasons for being in Afghanistan in the first place - largely at face value. Truly, they were innocents abroad.

Some of us are rather more sceptical. My fears that the Observer had become a soft touch were confirmed when the usually rigorous David Rose, the Observer journalist who had conducted the interviews, took to the airwaves to promote his story.

He came across as an advocate of their cause, rather than an independent and tough-minded inquisitor. It served only further to undermine the Observer’s handling of their story.

THE massacre in Madrid raised the difficult question of how much gore newspapers should show in pictures. The Spanish papers have more of a stomach for the unvarnished horror of terrorism than our own. They showed parts of limbs on the ground and gaping wounds while our papers tended not to publish the worst pictures or to doctor them to make them less shocking. It is largely a matter of taste and judgment: I tend to the gore to underline the true horror of terrorism; but there is no point in publishing pictures so terrible that people cannot even bear to look at them.

There should be one hard and fast rule: if a picture is amended to make it more palatable, the readers should be told. The Guardian correctly, if belatedly, did that with one picture in which it had covered part of a torn limb. Other papers were less honest.

EVEN hardened hacks had to wipe tears from their eyes at Monday night’s Daily Mirror Pride of Britain awards, which was taped for showing on Tuesday night on ITV. I know I did. Even the most cynical of us could not fail to be moved by tales of extraordinary courage and compassion by ordinary people. This annual event has become quite an extravaganza and Carol Vorderman did a magnificent job as master of ceremonies.

But what makes it special is the way it lines up some of the most famous celebrities in the land to present awards to unsung heroes. Perhaps that accounts for the higher quality of the acceptance speeches compared with those events where it is the celebrities who receive the awards. The evening is great PR for the Mirror and is a tribute to that paper and its editor. And where else could you hope to see the Prime Minister sandwiched between Ozzy Osbourne and Rachel Stevens over dinner?

ISRAEL’S refusal to allow entry to an award-winning Sunday Times journalist is a disgrace for a democracy which is meant to believe in press freedom.

Hala Jaber is an Arab journalist and no great friend of Israel. However, she is an honest and accurate reporter, which means she is just as critical of Arab dictatorships as Israeli excesses, and the Sunday Times is hardly a vehicle for anti-Israeli propaganda. Tel Aviv will say only that she was refused entry for security reasons. I take that to be shorthand for an independent journalist who will report the truth as she sees it.